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So I am going to be doing the music for this, which will be a good challenge for me. The goal is to have a music system that's reactive, so that it dynamically changes whether you are doing well or poorly. My current idea is to have a good base loop of percussion, bass and piano that maintains throughout, with other instruments dynamically layering on top of those. So if things are going bad, maybe things get darker or dischordant or more manic, and when things are going well the music sounds more pleasant and harmonious.

I think maybe my approach will be to first write the music at it's fullest and most prosperous state, then work backwards to establish the foundational track. Because it will be much easier to make the track sound worse than better.

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So here's a round-up of the music I made for this game (all links to soundcloud)

Sound DemoI first made this as a sort of demo, to show nkornek the direction I wanted to go. The idea was to demonstrate how different tracks could layer on each other, so that the music became fuller as the player did well, but became crazier and more synthy as they did worse. I'm not actually capable of making music where the instruments are genuinely convincing and natural, so I went back and listened to the soundtracks of Theme Park, Theme Hospital and Sim City 2000 to see how they made naturalistic sounding music in a low fidelity context. Theme Hospital ended up being the chief inspiration.

I futzed around for a while trying to figure out ways to incorporate John Williams' score into the main gameplay music, but ultimately without sheet music and more time it didn't seem doable. So after taking about a dozen stabs at various simple chord progressions and melodies, I finally settled on this. The trick was to make the base track work on it's own as a piece of music while still being able to be built upon, and to make it loop simply enough that layering new melodies on top would be easy while at the same time not being so simple that it ends up annoying the player. I think I did alright finding that spot.

Base Track Plus "Happy Layer"So after I finished my base track, I went back and added a new track where all my "Happy" layer elements (that is, the music that's added as you do a good job) would be. I decided the lead instrument on my "Happy Layer" would be the "Hot Air Flute" plug-in, because it's pleasant, it's light enough to not overpower the track, and it sort of implies that Central/South American vibe of Isla Nublar. I also added a cowbell because cowbells make me happy. For the purposes of the game, this Happy Layer had to be rendered as it's own separate audio track to be crossfaded in at will. But for the purposes of demonstration, this is what it sounds like layered on top of the base track.

Base Track Plus "Angry Layer"This was really fun to do, in part because it's closer to the kind of cacophonous aggressive percussive electronic music I like to make, and in part because it's a lot easier to make a track sound worse than it is to make it sound better. I decided a manic and fevered mood would really hammer home that the player is fucking up (and be a funnier backing track to watching dinos break free and roam around your park), so I went for a drum n bass approach. All the textures of the synth sounds had to be rough, so I used a lot of fat saws and deformed detuned leads. There's also a layer of total noise and random blips and bloops, but you can probably only hear it if you wear headphones and listen really carefully.

I figured someone playing a game jam game isn't going to spend a lot of time in the menu, so I went with simple rising action on a Marimba because it's an earthy natural sounding instrument, but it also implies a certain level of darkness or danger.

I had to slip some John Williams in here somewhere, and this felt like a no brainer. This is a "Tin Trumpet" instrument (which I think refers to the percussive echo that plays at the start of each note), with an echoing bell under it.